‘Krapotkin?’
‘The American desk shares a closed file with GRU on the American, William Craig. I want access to it.’
‘That’s a tall order.’
‘I need it, damn you!’ Kirov said fiercely.
‘OK! OK!’ Bogdanov agreed quickly. He concentrated on the road so that he didn’t have to look at Kirov and after a few seconds repeated in a pained voice, ‘OK,’ and again after a lapse, ‘OK.’
‘Craig set up the factory in Tbilisi,’ Kirov explained.
‘Terrific,’ Bogdanov responded moodily.
‘I’m going to Tbilisi.’
Nadezhda Dmitrievna answered the entry-phone in her fat sleepy voice. She was a fat young woman with a small, smooth and very pretty face. Neville Lucas, peddling the last scraps of his physical prowess and the fading charm of his dubious past, chased other women before the night closed on him and treated her badly if fidelity was a measure of performance. Nadezhda Dmitrievna appeared to accept this and exercised a mother’s patience, knowing that her perpetually adolescent son would always come home for her food and her fat embraces and because she washed his socks.
She met Kirov at the door, wearing a voluminous nightdress and a long woollen dressing gown.
‘Don’t get him drunk,’ she said sceptically and let Kirov in.
Behind her Lucas chimed in in English, ‘Peter! Super! Get a bottle, woman!’
‘He’s been to the National. Drinking with his friends. With Jack Melchior and one of his wives.’
‘A birthday!’ Lucas justified himself. ‘Got to celebrate birthdays. Traditional. Where would we all be without tradition?’
‘Make some coffee,’ Kirov suggested gently. ‘I’ll take care of him. What ho, Neville!’ he selected from Lucas’s repertoire of dated slang, heard and remembered in a hundred bars. He allowed Lucas to clasp him warmly.
‘I’m feeling splendid. And you? What brings you here? Pull up a pew.’ Lucas took a seat on an old chair and pulled a frayed pyjama jacket across his vest to make himself respectable. He was still wearing trousers. His feet were bare.
The centre of the room was occupied by a long trestle table. It held a model train set with a green engine and carriages in a brown and cream livery. Lucas had laid out the scenery of a West Country branch line as he remembered it from the holidays he had taken as a child in Torquay. The layout represented a decade of favours from visiting English businessmen who were short-changed with Lucas’s doubtful contacts in the foreign trade organisations — his little men who would always do a good turn for a pal.
‘I need a bed for the night.’
‘My humble abode is yours. What’s wrong? Has Lara locked you out?’ Lucas had forgotten that Lara had returned to the ballet and was sleeping with Radek. Nadezhda was used to the Englishman’s impromptu generosity.
‘I can’t make up a bed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
‘Anything will do.’
‘Anything will do — see?’ Lucas agreed. ‘And don’t forget to bring that bottle. Oh, and some cheese.’
‘No cheese. He has an ulcer,’ she explained to Kirov.
‘Bloody old hen,’ said Lucas equably.
‘She’s probably right. You should take care of your health.’
‘My health is fine.’ Lucas made a point. ‘From what my spies tell me, though, Grishin’s is none too good. Retired to his dacha, to Mummy and that idiot wife of his. Outmanoeuvred by Radek, so they say. Set up by the Rehabilitation Committee to take the blame for the disgrace of some surgeon or other, so they say. Funny, that — I had thought that if anyone was going to do for Grishin it would be you.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you were Grishin’s loyal subordinate. Who better to stab him in the back?’
‘Is that the way it works?’
‘Isn’t it?’ Lucas answered indifferently. ‘I thought it was a fine old Soviet tradition. All that stuff about medical poisoners plotting to kill Stalin — wasn’t that Beria’s doing? Or was Stalin plotting to kill Beria? I forget sometimes which way round these conspiracies are supposed to work.’
Nadezhda Dmitrievna padded into the room with a bottle of vodka and a plate of dry sausage — cut into slices, which she placed on the table. ‘Don’t keep him up too late,’ she said to Kirov. ‘You can sleep on the couch.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’ve grown a moustache.’
‘Yes.’
‘Neville keeps wanting to grow a beard.’
‘Go to bed, woman,’ said Lucas good-temperedly.
‘Don’t drink too much,’ she answered. Her little-girl face frowned as if with a little-girl problem, the multiplication tables or a stain on her party dress. Kirov sensed her relentlessness. Women had it in a way that men rarely did, perhaps in compensation for their lack of power. Power allowed men to fantasise about its use. Its absence demanded that women wear away at intractable reality with a chilling persistence if the world were to resemble what they wanted.
‘Cigarette?’ Lucas offered. A pile of cartons in their duty free wrappers stood on the floor. Obscure English brands. ‘Help yourself, I’m giving up.’
‘Why are you collecting them?’ It was a joke that Lucas importuned travellers at every opportunity to provide himself with their cigarettes.
Lucas shrugged. ‘A way of keeping the score? So long as they keep giving me their smokes, I know that they remember me. That’s important. Did you know that some old codger in MI5 published his memoirs not long ago? About Philby and Blunt and Hollis and all that old crap, MI5 spying into their navels and finding nothing but fluff.’
‘So?’
‘So I didn’t even rate a footnote! Bloody offensive, I call that!’
He poured two glasses of vodka and nibbled at a piece of sausage, closing his eyes as he did so. His pyjama jacket was too small. His trousers exposed his bare ankles. Finding clothes in Moscow to fit his large frame was a problem. His face relaxed to a deep and sleepy sagacity.
‘Which side are you on?’ Kirov asked.
Lucas’s slow eyes opened. He spoke lazily.
‘Sides? You’ve come to the wrong shop to talk about sides. I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m a traitor, Peter. It may not be much, legging over the Turkish border with a few out-of-date codebooks and nobody on my tail except a couple of traffic cops and a divorce lawyer, but I’ve learned to be proud of it.’
‘Why are you dealing in antibiotics?’
‘Not me, old son. At my age aphrodisiacs would be more in my line, and I’d even swap those for a reliable haemorrhoid cream. Where did you get that idea from?’
I’m too tired for this, Kirov thought. Interrogation by the long route. He had a vision of taking Lucas by the throat and shaking the evasions out of him. Never interrogate a friend — quote: Chestyakov to all the spotty kids who wanted to be spies.
‘You’ve grown a moustache,’ said Lucas, forgetting that the point had been made. ‘Taking a leaf out of Tomsky’s book? He’s growing one, or has he just shaved it off? forget.’
‘How did you get to know Yelena Akhmerova?’
‘A friend introduced us.’
‘Who?’
‘A friend — I don’t remember.’
‘Viktor Gusev?’
‘Gusev? Gusev? You’ve got me there, Peter. Someone you know? Someone from your Jewish antibiotics thing? Why Jewish, by the way, did you ever get an answer to that?’
‘I’m surprised you don’t know Viktor. Everyone knows Viktor. He hangs around all the best places with his gang of friends from Georgia. A regular customer at the Aragvi — isn’t that one of your favourite restaurants?’